by Greig Beck
Matt grunted his assent. “She’s right. Pharos itself was very small, only about as large as a few football fields together. And the entrance to the secret library could be anywhere surrounding it. A thousand years ago, it was shallows out there. Low tide might have exposed a lot more of the rock and perhaps some sort of cave entrance.”
“I doubt it,” Andy said. “This whole area is nothing but a layer of limestone over a bed of sandstone, the oldest ground being outcrops of metamorphic and igneous rocks. The island was created under high pressure, and therefore was a lot denser and more able to withstand the elements. Everything else would have been softer, and would wear away very quickly.” He looked at each of them, eyebrows raised.
Matt grinned. “Spoken like a true geologist.” He bumped knuckles with the young man.
“Benefits of a higher education.” Andy wiggled his brows. “But seriously, we should start with the remains of the island – if there is any type of entrance, it’ll probably be there.”
“Do we dive now or wait until the sun has risen a little more?” Tania asked, her eyes on the water. “Also, this area is notorious for tiger sharks.”
“We dive now,” Adira replied with a smirk. “And there are always man-eaters, Captain – above and below the water.”
Tania’s jaw set. “Dr Albadi said that it might not be open or even visible until the full moon. And the first phase of that is not until later tonight.”
“True, but we should at least familiarize ourselves with the territory – every second counts now.” Adira turned to look at Tania; her eyes were expressionless, but there was a hint of enjoyment at the corners of her mouth. “Have you ever done a night dive before?”
A challenge welled up momentarily in Tania’s eyes, but after a second or two, she simply shook her head and looked back out at the water.
Adira snorted softly. “I thought not. The underwater is a very different place at night. There is no light, other than what we bring – it can be disorienting and frightening to a novice.” Her eyes slid again to Tania. “Starting the search then would be extremely difficult or impossible. We will dive this morning, and at least try and narrow our field of search. Any objections?” Her eyes moved along the faces.
“Works for me,” Abrams said, his eyes also on Tania. He turned back and smiled. “It’ll also add to our cover story, doing what we are here to do – enjoy the diving.”
Adira nodded to a small boat hire firm on the beach. “There.”
*
The faded green Mercedes Benz with the two Mossad agents in the front seat sat under a tree that grew smaller as the seven-person group chugged away from the shore in the old wooden fishing boat.
Matt inhaled the sea air, and clung on to the seat, feeling old fish scales, splinters and dried salt against his palms. The air was still cool, but already he felt the hint of the balmy day to come, as sheets of golden light bathed their wetsuit-clad bodies.
The captain, Mahmood, a little man with few teeth and the brawniest forearms Matt had ever seen, knew exactly where the sunken island was to be found and also the best dive spots, as he’d taken probably hundreds of diving tourists out from the beach. Matt placed his hand on the rough gunwale; there were a few fingernail spots of green paint still attached, but the faded glory of huge hauls of shimmering silver bodies in woven rope nets was lost permanently now to the more lucrative tourist trade.
Adira stood in the small open cabin with Mahmood, chatting amiably, and Matt watched as he occasionally pointed out different landmarks on the shore. Adira nodded, looking impressed, probably extracting as much useful information as she could from their ancient mariner.
Each of them wore wetsuits with tanks, weights, and goggles pushed up on their foreheads. Matt admired Adira’s physique in the suit – long and athletic. He turned, and saw that Hartogg looked hugely bulked, like some sort of superman, and that Baruk also looked formidable. Abrams, Matt and Andy were more modestly muscled, and Tania looked tiny compared to the Israeli woman. However, her visible curves made it impossible for Matt not to think back to smooth, pale skin beneath his sheets. She smiled at him, and he smiled in return.
They travelled for another few minutes and then with the sandy beach just a yellow strip in the distance the captain turned off the engine and let the boat coast for a few dozen feet more. His eyes never left the shoreline as he lined himself up with a couple of taller landmarks, and then he called for Adira to nudge an iron pick anchor over the side. It loudly dragged about ten feet of chain and then a few more dozen feet of salt-toughened rope into the magnificent blue water. Matt watched as the rope sizzed dryly on the gunwale and rapidly sank. In another second it suddenly went limp.
“Bottom,” Mahmood said in English. He turned and grinned.
Adira looked around slowly, and then spoke in Egyptian to Baruk. He nodded and took off his mask – the agent had just been volunteered for topside lookout duties.
Adira put a foot up on a seat and pointed out over the water. “Out there – Mahmood says we are just fifty feet from the island. He won’t drop anchor any closer due to the underwater snags. Some places are only twenty feet deep; others can drop down to eighty. He said that the island has broken into three pieces, and the fissures are the deepest areas…but there’s nothing in them to see.” She waved her arm over the water. “Columns, sphinxes, and blocks are scattered in a wide area.” She turned to each of them. “We start with the island, and then we can broaden our search if we need to.” She stepped down and walked in among them. “Okay, we all get dive buddies – the major and myself, Matt and Andy, Lieutenant Hartogg and Captain Kovitz.” She zipped her suit to the top, and looked at her dive watch. “Stay in visual. It’s now seven hundred hours. First surface in thirty minutes; clear?”
Everyone nodded. Breathing equipment was given final checks, goggles came down, and then bodies fell backwards over the side.
They swam down at an angle into the azure water, and Matt was delighted to find that it was warmer in the ocean than up on the boat’s deck. He had dived many times before, but was far from an enthusiast. Matt remembered descending in inky black water – there was something about not knowing what was below you that still gave him the creeps…especially as he understood that there were things in the depths staring back at you, big things, seeing you without you even knowing they were there.
Matt shuddered; he wasn’t looking forward to the night dive for exactly all those reasons. But this dive…this was more like it. The water was a magnificent blue, like tinted glass, and so warm he was sure they didn’t really need their wetsuits. As he descended, he looked at his companions and smiled around his mouthpiece; the group stayed fairly close together – a school of oversized water mammals heading to the bottom to forage, clouds of bubbles streaming up behind them.
They neared the sand, and Matt spotted his first relic – a broken sphinx, probably weighing about two tons, and nearly perfectly formed. Andy swam in close to him and pointed at the stone lion creature, then gave Matt a thumbs up. Matt smiled; the geologist’s eyes were round with enthusiasm behind his goggles.
They headed on towards the island, and the sea floor started to resemble a building site or a disused quarry. Huge blocks, half-sunken columns, and giant slabs of coral-coated stone were all thrown together, all encrusted with algae, barnacles, and coral of all colors and ages. Then, looming up in the distance, a small broken mountain – the sunken Island of Pharos. To Matt, it looked like the carcass of some dead prehistoric creature curled up on the sand, the leviathan body all sharp angles and weird growths.
The group hovered in the water – the remains of the island were about several hundred feet around, and Mahmood had been right, it was broken into the three. Fish of varying sizes patrolled the deep cracks that dropped beyond the sun’s rays.
Adira swam on strongly and was first to the top, where she waited, floating above one deep rent. She pointed to Matt, and then to Hartogg and then into the other fissures: t
he meaning was clear – each take one and descend.
Thumbs up were returned, and then into the cracks each team descended.
Matt exhaled and, as the air left his lungs, his weight belt took him into the deep vent in the rock. It was wide enough for Andy to follow at his side, and the geologist nudged him, pointing out jutting edges and striations in the natural rock, and then making cracking apart motions with his hands. Matt nodded, getting it: the last earthquake must have been so huge it literally tore the island apart, and dragged the rest to the bottom as effectively as the kraken did ancient schooners.
As they dropped further, they both switched on wristband flashlights and pointed them downward. Matt was surprised and dismayed by how far their crack in the island descended, and as he kicked lower, he had to stop several times to repressurize his eardrums.
Close to the bottom now, the corals and sea grasses that relied on light had disappeared, and softer sponges dominated. Spiny crustaceans waved antennae from the rock ledges, and small fish darted in and out of Matt’s light beam. He heard his breathing loud in his ear, and the occasional clang from one of their tanks as they bumped into the ever-converging walls.
Andy jammed into him, and they both slowed as they came to the wedge end. Matt righted himself and hovered, panning his light one way, then the next. He examined the walls…there was nothing that even remotely indicated humans had touched these depths, let alone some sort of entranceway or passage. Andy floated up beside him and shrugged. Matt nodded, and pointed along the length of the fissure – they’d do a slow traverse along the craggy corridor and then surface.
As Matt and Andy were coming to the end another flashlight flickered above them. They came up together to find the small form of Tania and the much larger one of Hartogg, together looking like a mother whale and its calf. Tania waved them on to the fissure she had checked and led them down into the crack. About a third of the way in they came to a stone block embedded in the fissure wall. To Matt it looked like a piece of the ruined lighthouse that had tumbled in during the cataclysm, and then become overgrown. But Tania tapped it and shook her head.
Matt guessed she meant it shouldn’t be there. She should know, she’s the archeologist, he thought. He moved his flashlight along its edge, and saw nothing that indicated it was anything other than what he initially suspected – a block of stone. He looked back at her and shrugged again. Andy, who was performing his own inspection, turned and made growing-over motions with his hands.
Matt nodded and hung suspended before the slab for a moment, looking at its shape and size, then reached out. As soon as his fingers touched the edge of the stone, his mind exploded with vivid images – he saw the world, Earth, but not the Earth as we knew it. The scene was so ancient there was no moon yet captured by our gravity. The sky had few stars, and our world bubbled and steamed as it still cooled.
It should have been impossible to recognize, but Matt knew it was our own. He looked out over a vast, blood-red landscape. The seas had not yet formed, but it was not devoid of life – there were monstrous creatures, fighting and mating, killing and maiming. Things with vast evil intellects whose machinations touched the entire universe, and whose life spans could ride out a thousand apocalypses.
The sounds were terrifying: their bodies were so huge that mountains were crushed to dust when they fought, and craters were smashed into a continent’s crust when they fell. Impossibly, Matt’s mind registered it all, and the worst came when he inhaled and the smell of their blood and excrement filled his nostrils. He ripped away his mouthpiece and jetted a stream of vomit into the water. Immediately the murky cloud started to settle towards the bottom of the crack, and dozens of small fish shot from nowhere to pick out the larger chunks as it floated down – A free feast, pre-chewed, Matt thought.
Tania swam over, but with the images shut down, and his breakfast gone, Matt immediately felt better. He nodded and had replaced his mouthpiece. Tania pointed to the surface.
They came up together, broke the surface, pushed their masks up and trod water. Within another minute all the divers had returned, and together they swam slowly back towards the boat.
“Anything?” Adira called.
“Nada. Just a giant crack in the rocks that is home to plenty of sea sponges and a few nosy lobsters. The most we can get down there is a nice dinner,” Andy said, and then grinned. “That’s if you like fish with a touch of Kearns sauce.”
“I’m okay,” Matt said. “Must have been the breakfast, or something. Just got a bit sick. I’m okay.” He changed the subject not wanting to dwell on the images, but knew that reading the copy of the Al Azif must have affected him more than he’d like to think. “The stone slab set into the wall,” he said. “May be nothing, but we weren’t expecting anything obvious were we?”
“Describe it,” Adira said quickly.
Tania recounted the size and shape. “It was definitely Lighthouse-era stonework, and the only sign of human habitation below the island’s crustal surface.”
Adira looked to Matt and Andy, and the geologist bobbed his head. “Maybe. I mean it sure looked like a tumbled part of the edifice to me. But could just be where the earthquake tore open the surface skin of the island and some debris fell in.”
Matt nodded. “Yeah, not sure it was anything significant. But might be worth bringing back a crowbar.”
Adira looked at the sky and then her watch. “We take a break and warm up on deck. Then we have time for one more dive before we head back. We’ll take a quadrant each, and expand our perimeter search.”
In another few hours they were on their way back, the afternoon growing cold with a slight breeze kicking up over the water. Matt sat on one edge of the boat, Tania and Abrams in the seat next to him. “Going to be the first full moon tonight. If there’s anything more to find, then this has gotta be it.”
When they reached the shore, Adira froze momentarily, and then spoke in hushed tones to Baruk. He continued unpacking the boat, but his eyes slid left then right along the coastal road.
Matt eased up next to her. “Problem?”
She also continued with her tasks, but spoke softly in Hebrew, knowing only Matt, of the Americans, would understand. “Our security is gone.”
Matt looked for the Mercedes that had been parked under the tree. She was right; it was nowhere to be seen. He responded in her language. “Would they have been called away?”
“If there were overriding orders, I would know. I need to call this in,” she said. She looked from Abrams to Hartogg, who now seemed tuned in to her unease.
“Our time is running out.”
*
“Enough.”
Drummond walked from the shadows in the soundproofed basement and stood before the bound man. Kroen stepped back, breathing hard. There was a small smile of ecstasy on his blood-splattered face. The huge bodyguard wore a plastic apron and dark shirt, sleeves rolled up. Blood and specks of flesh coated the material and ran down the plastic to the floor. Sticking from the large front pocket of the apron was a pair of greasy-looking bolt cutters.
Drummond looked down – there were two seats, nailed to the ground and facing each other. They both contained naked men, one untouched but with eyes heavy with fatigue and scoured of any human emotion. The other contained a man who had been beaten to a red mess. Bits of bone showed whitely at his eyebrows and cheekbones. Both eyes were swollen closed and his lips were split, in one place so badly the remains of his broken teeth showed through. Scattered around him on the floor were ten fingers, looking like pale grubs trailing bloody tracks back to their former owner.
Drummond walked around the ruined man, tsk-tsking, and placed a hand on his bloody shoulder from behind. He wore rubber gloves, and gently patted his captive. He looked across at the untouched man.
“This must really hurt. The important thing is, I’m not doing this because I hate him – I don’t even know Agent Herzl here. I’m not doing it for him, or Kroen, or even myself. In fact, you
may have noticed that I have not asked a single question of him…although I have many.”
Drummond reached up and stroked the man’s sweat-soaked hair. “Many questions…but not for him. I’m not a monster…not really. Nothing like what’s coming.” He stifled a laugh, then spoke in perfect Hebrew to Agent Herzl. “Release you now?”
The battered head came up a fraction, and one of the eyelids twitched but couldn’t possibly open through all the swelling and sticky blood. Drummond straightened. “Kroen. Show him our mercy.”
Kroen, turned and lifted a huge silver bowl from a tabletop, and came and placed it between the battered man’s legs.
Drummond looked to the untouched seated man. His eyes now burned like lasers beams of pure hate. The older man smiled. “Good – anger, defiance, determination – you will need it all. Agent Kahan, what you see here is nothing more than a demonstration of our resolve. Soon, you will pray to be given this merciful gift.”
Drummond held out his hand, and Kroen placed a long silver surgical blade into it. In a flash he dragged it across the man’s lower abdomen, causing his entire bowel and intestines to spill forward heavily and plop into the bowl. The man shuddered, and his ragged lips opened in a moan.
Drummond stroked the man’s hair, almost the way someone would their favorite cat that had taken up residence on their lap. He smiled and watched as blood ran thickly, already overflowing the crowded bowl. The room filled with the smell of dark blood and the contents of Herzl’s bowels.
“Phew, what have you been eating?” Drummond laughed with good humor. Kroen passed him a clean towel, which he used to wipe off the blade. “This might surprise you…” he went on, stepping out from behind the dying man “…but a human being can survive…well, exist anyway, with his bowels outside of his body, for many, many hours.” He looked up with raised eyebrows. “Not a good look though, hmm?”